I stepped back from the car, the door shut behind me with a faint echo, as the engines started to run. The streets were quiet and damp from the rain as I made my way toward the school.
Louis' words kept echoing inside my head. "…belong".
That part especially felt heavy on my chest. The more I thought about it while heading back to my classroom, the more I could feel my senses around me getting duller. I found myself clinging to that word alone.Belonging.My head started to hurt and as thus I was starting to spiral. The rain was of no matter. Nor did anything else seem to be. Inexplicably, I couldn't form a single thought. All that I could do in that moment was to feel what I was trying to suppress, for all these years.
Even now, I cannot fully explain what seized me then. I remember lowering myself in front of the school's main entrance, my body yielding before my mind could object. A few children passed me on their way home.
Curled in the rain, hopeless, pitifully small before the doors.
Tears streamed down my face, though I felt none of them. Rainwater mingled with the tears, as if even my pain wished to disguise itself, ashamed to be seen. Someone, by society standards, who they are supposed to look up to.Yet, none of that mattered.
In that moment, I felt as if I were the only being left on this pitiful earth. Not simply alone, but wrong;
as if my very presence itself was a mistake, as though merely continuing to breathe was an act of shame.Since my father left and my mother turned her gaze away from me, I had been exactly that: alone. Persistently, irrevocably alone.
So how dare I want to belong? Belonging is for humans, and I had long stopped thinking of myself as one. I was something less. Something that could imitate people, stand among them, even teach their children — yet never truly be one of them. Every time I reached for belonging, it slipped through my fingers, crushed before I could even feel its warmth.
I do not know how long I remained there, folded into myself, when a small shadow stopped before me.
"Um… sir?"
His voice was hesitant, thin, yet firm. It cut through the fog in my head. I slowly life my face. A child stood there, backpack slung loosely over one shoulder, rain dripping from his hair. He looked at me not with fear or disgust, but with something gentler— concern, perhaps, or simple curiosity.
"Are you okay?"
In that instant, something inside me loosened. The world returned in to me, the sound of rain, the cold against my skin, the ache in my knees. Back then I wasn't aware, but now I realized that what had pulled me back was not reason, nor kindness, but something far simpler.
It was hope.
I had tried to convince myself for years that I no longer believed in it. That hope was a childish thing, meant for those who still counted themselves human. And yet, it had found me again. I still lived on for that thin, silver thread, even though I should have let it slip long ago.
I stood up and told the child to get home safely. He gave a small nod, then hurried off, his footsteps fading into the rain.
After that, I went back to my classroom.
Everything was just as I had left it. The chair by the piano was still turned the wrong way, untouched since I stood up. And the descending sun, that last warm exhalation of the daylight saying goodbye, had made itself comfortable in the room
It filled the classroom and rested on the piano, glinting softly off the keys. Beyond the window, Paris stretched out under the fading daylight. I watched the boulevard below: people walking home from work, couples meeting for dinner, families gathering their children, voices overlapping as they moved together through the evening.
They all had somewhere to be. Somewhere they belonged.
I stood there for a while, simply watching through the now closed window, as the city continued doing what it can do best. Being Alive. After a while , dusk had settled over everything. Not quite night, no longer day.
Just dusk.
And as dusk began turning to night, the lights across Paris flickered on in something close to unison. But in that moment—that exact moment right before the lights come on—the city went dark for even less than a second.
And in that moment, with the city void of light, my face appeared in the glass in front of me. Green eyes, brown hair that curled enough to be messy but not enough to look intentional. A face that seemed a little tired around the edges, the kind of tired that creeps in when you stop paying attention to things like sleep or meals or whether your shirt is buttoned right. Nothing dramatic. Just a bit worn down. Unkept.
I stared at myself. They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, which would mean I was still looking through a window—just a different one. And for a moment, peering into my own reflection, it came over me.
"Purpose.", I whispered, as the lights came on fully, and my face disappeared from the glass
It was only a second, maybe less. Yet it felt longer than it had any right to be.
All those years I had a feeling to what I was lacking. Even when playing, I lacked purpose. But everything that is meaningful has a purpose. The light in this city has meaning. A purpose. It illuminates for those around it. The streetlamps along the Seine guide the late walkers home, to reflect off the water for the ones leaning over bridges, to make the city feel a little less alone in the dark. Even the smallest café light spilling onto the pavement exists for someone. Someone who needs to find the door, someone who forgot their way.
And they are beautiful too, these lights. Not because they try to be. They simply are.
Meaning and beauty. The lights had both. They meant something and they were something, all at once.Simply a purpose.And me? I stood there in the dark, my face gone from the glass now, just another shadow watching the lights. I had only this: the vague sense that I was supposed to have both too, and the uncomfortable feeling that I'd been walking around for years without ever quite finding either. I yearned for both. All my life.
Every second of this life that has brought me nothing but shame in this cursed existence of mine.
My thoughts drifted back to what Louis had said. Belong.
Does belonging entail a purpose? A meaning? Or is purpose the very foundation of belonging? That I can't belong to this life if I can't find a purpose? How is it that I can't have either?
"Why do I hate myself so much?" I mumbled.
The words sat there in the dark, small and low. But they grew, swelling in my chest until I couldn't keep them contained.
"What is this ache in my chest? I don't wanna feel, so why do I?"
My voice rose with each word until I was shouting — screaming, really — at no one. At the empty room. At the city going about its evening beyond the glass. At myself, mostly.
Always at myself.
"Who is this empty shell that I stared into?"
I reached out and slowly looked up, searching for something to catch the question. And there it was — the full moon, just peeking over the edge of the window. Red. Crimson.
Then the light came.
It poured through the window slowly at first, then all at once, engulfing the classroom in its crimson glow. And somehow—I couldn't explain it then, can't explain it now—all those thoughts, that ache in my chest, they just… disappeared.
Just gently set down somewhere out of reach.
Beauty in its truest form.
Capable of soothing even the most distraught souls.
I looked over at the piano, bathed in that red shine, and something inside me shifted. Without thinking twice, without letting myself consider whether this was a good idea or another mistake, I shed my coat — let it fall to the floor in a heap — and sat down. My hands found the keys like they'd been waiting there all along, patient and forgiving.
And I played.
With everything I had. With my very soul, if there is such a thing.
The moon bore witness to whatever came out of me, asking nothing in return.
It felt strange at first. Wrong, even. I had sworn I wouldn't play again, and here I was breaking that promise like it meant nothing. The keys resisted under my fingers, stiff and unfamiliar. But then, slowly, the sounds began to clear. They started to feel like something I knew. Something inside me, buried deep, was finally finding its way back to the surface.
I lost all sense of time. It meant nothing to me. There was only the music, only the crimson red light and the strange yet terrifying sensation of feeling alive again.
When the moon finally slipped past the edge of the window, taking its light with it, reality returned like a door closing behind me. I sat there, hands resting on the keys, and realized what had just happened. It hit me all at once — the weight of it and with it the strangeness of it.
Years. It had been years since I'd felt a trance like that.
Since I felt so alive.
This was real. This had been mine.
And now here it was, this thing in my chest. This small, fragile thing I didn't have a name for. It flickered there like a candle , uncertain, easily extinguished, and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know if I wanted it or feared it. All I knew was that I couldn't let it go.